Ride the Drift
by Viridicus
Summary: Adventure Time AU in the Pacific Rim universe. Marceline is a brash, hotheaded jaeger pilot still reeling from the loss of her brother, Marshall Lee. Princess Bubblegum is the brilliant scientist in charge of restoring the jaeger program. Bubblegum thinks Marceline is the exact wrong person to be piloting this jaeger, but discovers they're drift compatible...
1. Chapter 1

**Ride the Drift**

**Viridicus**

**A/N: **So this is a _Pacific Rim _meets _Adventure Time _AU. Essentially I'm going to tell the story of _Pacific Rim _with the characters of _Adventure Time _ - but because the AT peeps are different, with different personalities and so on, things may (will) change. I'm warning you now, so you can't get mad at me when your favorite bits of the story aren't exactly the way they were in the movie. Rating starts at T now for language and character death, but may go up in later chapters.

**Chapter One**

She was dead asleep when the alarm began to blare, but she'd always been a light sleeper, so she had already dropped out of her bunk and started beating on his shoulder to wake him before he'd even registered the noise. "Hey fuckface! Category 3 surfaced just off the coast of Alaska! We're on!" Whooping, she made her way – tripping over two pairs of boots, his and hers – to the closet, where she began pulling on her coveralls.

It was hard for her to conceptualize just how a pair of misfit orphans like Marshall Lee and Marceline Abadeer had come to this – to being the pilots of the Pacific Northwest's top jaeger, the Scream Queen – and she wasn't really one to ruminate. She was kind of the action type – she usually let Marshall do the thinking, which was funny because _he _wasn't really the thinking type either. The difference was largely that if she took it into her head to jump into a volcano, Marshall would be a step after, not before. She usually put it up to her being two minutes older – he had to take a couple of minutes to think about it first.

It had gotten them in no small amount of trouble growing up, but ultimately the attributes that had driven teachers and foster families crazy – their willingness to take on all comers, and their unwillingness to ever be parted from one another – coupled with the kaiju apocalypse that had turned the world into a war zone meant that the Abadeer twins were the Pacific Northwest coastline's first and best line of defense. As Marceline shrugged into her leather jacket (patched on the back with an image of a snarling vampire, and notched with four confirmed kaiju kills) she pictured the day ahead of her: suiting up and driving out in the grey predawn light to where the head of the Scream Queen was waiting for them, waiting to be brought to life by the joining of two minds. The perfect synchronization known as the Drift.

Marceline swatted Marshall's ass with her towel to get him going and then charged out into the corridor, knowing her brother wouldn't be far behind. Pepper Butler, the jaeger station's mission coordinator, met her on the way to the bay. "Good morning, Abadeers! Got a live one for you today. Sensors indicate that our latest buddy, a Category Three we're calling Knifehead, surfaced about five miles out from the Alaskan coastline. Your orders are to patrol the Miracle Mile until it gets here and then prevent it from making landfall." Pepper allowed himself a grin. "Meaning, of course, kick some ass." Marceline let out a whoop, and heard her brother's echoing voice.

They trotted into the hangar and took the elevator to the top of the Scream Queen's head and climbed into the cockpit. There Marceline pulled on her armor, worn, scuffed, scarred, and perfectly broken in. _Hers. _Tightening the straps on the body armor and tapping each piece with a closed fist to make sure it was on fast sent a thrill through her stomach. Glancing over her shoulder she met her twin's bleary eyes with a toothy grin, and saw him sleepily return it. Slow to start he might have been, but he loved this just as much as she did.

"Ready to get into my head, little sister?"

"Ready to step into mine, baby brother?"

Their pit crew bustled around, attaching the drift mesh to their spines and testing the connection. As Marceline pulled on her helmet, she felt the familiar coil of fear and excitement in her gut. This could be the day they notched their fourth kill, and this could also be the day that ended their lives. Kaiju were getting bigger and stronger and, some whispered, _smarter _with every breach. But: they were the Abadeer twins, piloting the Scream Queen, the biggest, baddest jaeger on the Best Coast! There was no way they could lose.

"Engage neural handshake. Drifting in three…two…one…mark."

The familiar flood of shared memories filled their minds as they meshed – chasing puppies in the park, standing up to bullies at school, various foster families and homes all crowding in one after another – and then they were looking through the same set of eyes, and those eyes were the eyes of a jaeger. _Their _jaeger. Pepper's voice filled their ears: "Sir, we've established a connection. Neural handshake strong and holding."

"All right!"

"Let's do this!"

They felt the swooping of their stomachs as the Scream Queen's head dropped a hundred feet along the rails onto her shoulders, and then the thunderous crunch of metal as the clamps locked them in. They glanced at each other, seeing with mirrored gazes – Marceline looking at herself through Marshall's eyes, and feeling himself looking back. They shared a private grin, and then both snapped to attention as Marshall Petrikov's voice cracked like a whip through their helmet speakers.

"All right, Scream Queen, listen up. The kaiju you'll be meeting today, Knifehead, is by all accounts one of the biggest we've ever seen. It's about twenty tons so you'll be evenly matched. Patrol the Miracle Mile and keep Knifehead from making landfall. Fight hard, fight smart, and take no chances, and you'll bag us a win today."

"Yes, sir," Marshall said, nodding, but Marceline frowned. That was the second time today she'd heard something about not taking chances and sticking to the plan, and that stuck in her craw. She heard plenty about it all the time and usually ignored it, but today seemed different: the Marshall and Pepper had both seemed pretty keen on it. The thought was driven out of their shared heads, however, when the helicopters transporting the Scream Queen began to hover, and the lead pilot's voice crackled through their headsets: "Destination reached. Prepare for drop." Marshall and Marceline braced themselves.

Scream Queen dropped into the icy ocean with a thunderous crash. Marceline and her brother had braced for the impact and so the Queen hit with bent knees, absorbing most of the shock; it still rocked them around in the cockpit, however. They swiveled their head, taking a moment to get their bearings, as an icy storm roared around them, lashing the unfeeling Queen with rain and sleet. Waves lashed at their waist as the Queen began to wade with ponderous steps to the point where she'd begin patrolling for the kaiju.

Not more than ten minutes into their trek Marceline realized the reason for Pepper and the Marshall's twitchiness. "There! Ten o' clock!" The Scream Queen's head swiveled to take in the reason for a ping on their sonar: a fishing vessel tossing in the massive waves, estimated to contain about five souls. Petrikov heard her too.

"Scream Queen, you do _not _engage. Repeat, do not engage. You'll be risking the lives of two million people to save ten."

"But sir, we're nearly at our destination!" Marceline said, feeling her face heat inside her helmet. "We can make it, I know we can!"

"Scream Queen, that's an order!"

Marceline muttered something that could have approximated "yes sir" and then turned to her brother. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Duh, dumbass, I'm in your head!"

"So…wanna go fishing?"

Marshall sighed, but he didn't need to say anything: Marceline already knew he'd agree. Slowly but inexorably, the Scream Queen adjusted her course to intercept the fishing boat. When she'd reached pickup distance she bent down – slowly, slowly, a miracle of coordination complicated by the fact that Petrikov was barking into their headsets to head the _fuck _back to their post – the Queen reached down and closed her fist gently around the boat. And at that exact moment, the kaiju breached the surface of the Pacific Ocean, driving its massive body into the jaeger.

They were both thrown against their restraints with the impact and screamed with it, hearing the crunch and groan of the jaeger's metal body and cursing themselves for letting the monster get the jump on them. But Marshall had the presence of mind to wind up and chuck the fishing vessel as far as he could towards the coast – if they couldn't make their way from there, nothing could save them. Then they had both arms free to turn and fight the kaiju.

It was big – Jesus god it was big, like nothing they'd ever seen before. There was once a time when jaegers had been sized similarly to kaiju, and when jaeger builders has been able to keep pace with the beasts' ever-increasing expansion – but this thing dwarfed them almost hilariously. The Abadeers had never backed down from a fight, though, and they didn't intend to start. Burning with her brother's determination and her own, Marceline swung the jaeger's left arm to crack satisfyingly against the monster's jaw.

Beside her, Marshall was already firing up the pulsar – she was shouting at him, and he heard her, and they weren't entirely certain whether it was out loud or in their heads – and he was telling her he needed twelve seconds, twelve seconds until the first pulse would be ready, so she wound up for another swing. But Knifehead had recovered and was surging towards them through the water, the sharp spur of bone for which he was named swinging dangerously close to the jaeger's cockpit. She curtailed her swing and used it to catch at the kaiju instead, holding it back and positioning it perfectly so her brother could land one, two, three pulses directly into its chest.

The monster fell back into the ocean, squalling, the blue glow of its mouth harsh against the swirling black waves. They could see the glow of its body under the surface, but it didn't move. Marceline let out a whoop, pumping the Queen's left arm against the sky. Marshall's echoing elation thrilled through her entire body.

Of course, just like a damn spoilsport, Marshall Petrikov's voice filled their ears, cutting short their victory dance. "Scream Queen, what the _hell _is going on? You're _miles _off your post!"

Anger snapped through Marceline and Marshall Lee, but it crackled out of her first: "Sir, Knifehead's down! We lit it up twice, bagged our fifth kill! And saved the civilian vessel –."

"You disobeyed a direct order! You could have gotten yourselves killed!"

"Sir," said Marshall hotly, "we intercepted the kaiju and saved everyone on that boat!"

Never one for congratulations, Petrikov snapped, "Get back to your post!"

"Sir yes sir," Marshall replied, his mouth quirking. Their commander would probably have them out there in the cold and wet for another hour patrolling just to show them who was boss, and then it'd be back to base for a celebratory beer or ten. They'd made certain nobody would ever say the Abadeers didn't fight hard; nobody would ever _dream _of saying that they didn't party hard after.

Knifehead surged out of the roiling surf, rearing its insane bulk over the jaeger's head and bringing it all crashing down with twin screams of fury and rending metal. The pilots had had no time to brace themselves – the impact drove the Scream Queen to her knees and nearly over, and the screaming kept on going and going. Marceline eventually realized it was her own: the creature's claws had sheared partway through the cockpit and into her own left arm, rending it down to the bone. As she stared at the ruin of the jaeger's hemisphere controls she noticed she could see the sky through the hole in the cockpit, and the waves…and the beast.

It probably had four or six eyes, all slitted and piglike and in a row along its head, and half of them were focused on her. She'd never been one to fear a kaiju before but the alien fury in those burning orbs made her think it might be a good time to start. So instead she screamed, "Marshall! Kill it!"

Her brother swung himself around to grapple with the monster, yanking it away from his sister and landing solid, thudding blows against its head and neck. It roared, an oceanic, titanic sound, and swung its vast knife-like head against the jaeger again, ripping at more metal and making sparks fly in the cockpit. Marceline could hear the grinding and whining of gears and knew the Scream Queen couldn't take much more of this. They had to stop Knifehead for good…somehow.

Her mind raced as Marshall struggled to hold off the kaiju with only one arm, and as it battered the jaeger mercilessly. They had discharged their pulsar, and hers had been the arm with the spinning blades…there was only one weapon left. "Charge chest cannon!" she screamed with everything she had in her, punching the controls furiously with the arm that still worked.

"Charging!" Marshall worked alongside her, grappling with the kaiju at the same time. It was seriously impressive, to split your attention that way; usually you needed everything you had to keep your focus in the fight. Marceline had never loved her brother more.

And then it happened: the thing she would see in her dreams every night after, the thing she would remember as though it were happening for the rest of her life. Knifehead drove the jaeger to its knees and, with one claw, reached into the cockpit – shattering the panes of bulletproof glass that were their eyes – and ripped Marshall Lee out of the harness, screaming, his pain and fear echoing a thousand times over in Marceline's head.

Until it didn't.

Until he was gone and his loss left an aching hole inside her, like the hole in the jaeger's body where her left arm had once been. But there was still a kaiju staring down at her, a kaiju that held her brother's lifeless body in its claw. And she was still drifted with what remained of the jaeger.

Drawing on every ounce of mental and physical strength she had left in her, Marceline turned the Scream Queen's body so its charged chest cannon faced the kaiju dead on. Screaming wordlessly with the pain of her brother's loss and the effort of controlling a jaeger solo – like the world's worst headache a thousand times over – she reached out her hand and punched in the detonation code, just as Knifehead began reaching for her too.

The Scream Queen's chest cannon punched a gaping hole into the kaiju's chest. It almost immediately began to fill with the thing's glowing blue blood, but the damage was done: the furious alien life left its eyes almost immediately, and it slowly began to topple over into the surf. And now Marceline was left drifted with the remains of a jaeger, with rain lashing in and making the instruments spark and crackle. Shore was a mile off. At this point, simply sinking to her knees and letting the ocean take her seemed preferable.

But somehow, screaming with pain and grief and effort, Marceline made the Scream Queen take a step, and then another, in the direction of the coastline. _Just one more step_, she promised herself, and felt tears begin to course down her cheeks at the lack of Marshall's answer. _This step's the last, I promise. Just one more. _She kept going.

When she felt the jaeger's toes dig into turf she finally let herself do what her mind, brain, and body had been begging her to do since the kaiju had torn half of her away: she let the Scream Queen fall to her knees, and then collapse face first to the sand. Shaking and crying and screaming a little she wrenched at the straps of her harness to fall free herself. She wanted to just lie there, letting the relief of the suddenly relieved pressure of the drift thrill through her. But she was missing something, something terribly important. She had to find it.

She struggled to her feet, eyes wild, casting about for the thing she had lost, not entirely sure what it was but just knowing she needed to find it. What was it? It was so important…had stayed by her side her whole life…had come into the world with her…and now she'd never hear his voice, feel his warm and comforting presence inside her head again. She collapsed to her knees. "Marshall," she choked out, through sobs. "Marshall."

There was somebody there, some entirely unimportant person putting his hands on her shoulders and shaking her, saying something about getting help. It didn't matter what he did, or she did, or anybody did. All she knew was that Marshall was gone, gone forever into the ocean with that kaiju, and as far as she was concerned, she was gone too.


	2. Chapter 2

**Ride the Drift**

**Viridicus**

**A/N: **Couldn't help myself. I was planning to do about an update a week but I've been writing about a chapter a day, so it might be less time between updates. I've just got some really exciting stuff in the pipeline and I really wanna share it! Thanks to mr. Canadian, guest, alecita122, and Nobody2012 for the reviews.

**Chapter Two**

"Here's the deal, people: you work, you eat!"

It was the same thing the foreman said every day; Marceline had heard it most every morning for the last five years. She kept her eyes down, away from the foreman's familiar bulk. She had tried to stay low, off his radar, ever since she'd decked him last year with a swift right hook for grabbing her ass. It was a good thing one hit had floored him - she didn't have a left to follow it up with. Her arm had never been the same.

But she could still work, and he knew that, so he didn't try to stop her from working. He just gave her the most dangerous jobs. "I got good news and bad news, people. Which one do you want first?"

Somebody near her shouted, "Bad news?"

"Three guys fell off the top of the wall yesterday."

A pulse of trepidation rippled through the crowd. The foreman let it subside before saying, "Good news is I got three open spots, top of the wall. How bout...Jenkins, Taylor, and..." He made a show of squinting around the crowd, then settled on her. "Abadeer. Go flying."

She'd known he'd say that, and she didn't mind. She would pick up any kind of work she could get, and the height didn't bother her, not after being the pilot of a robot the size of a skyscraper. She shouldered one of the beat-up jetpacks - named ironically, as they could only send out little combustive bursts to keep someone from falling _too _hard, and even that was theoretical - and made her way to her assigned section of the wall.

Up here at the top, welding and pounding in beams on the Sitka section of the Great Coastal Wall - supposed to be the final defense against the kaiju incursion - she let her mind drift. It still hurt to fade into that mindset and not hear an answer, just like it hurt to not meet an answering smirk and snarky comment at the foreman's attitude, but up here the pain was duller. She could almost forget what she had lost.

When Marshall Petrikov's escort had picked her up on the beach, she was raving with cold and pain and lack - the inescapable lack of Marshall Lee's answering thoughts in her head, his smile, his voice in her ear. She had refused to leave the beach until she found him and had had to be sedated and carried back to the base on a stretcher. In the infirmary she'd managed to work free of the straps keeping her in her bed one night and they'd found her a mile down the coastline, half frozen and quartering the beach like a dog.

Eventually the terrible fog had lifted, but that almost made it worse - she was forced to come to terms with what she'd lost, with the fact that Marshall Lee really, truly wasn't ever coming back. She wasn't in any kind of psychological shape to be going it alone, but the jaeger program's budget was already tight and getting tighter every day, funds being drained off for the Coastal Wall. There wasn't money for therapy, physical or otherwise. So when the base's doctor had pronounced her arm healed enough, she was honorably discharged. They even tried to give her a medal, but she refused to attend the ceremony, and she didn't have a fixed address for them to send the thing to.

For a while she drifted. Fighting and Marshall had been all she'd ever known, but Marceline was lucid enough to understand that the loss of the one had made the other impossible. She traveled for a while, bumming rides and smokes and beds where she could get them and taking odd jobs when she couldn't, but it wasn't enough, not in the new kaiju economy. When she caught herself considering doing some things she had promised herself and Marshall she would never do, she realized she was going to have to settle down somewhere, find some steady work. At this point the only steady honest work to be found was on the Wall. They hired her for day labor, didn't care when she couldn't come in because she was deep in a sweating, shaking waking nightmare, reliving that day over and over and over. They had a massive pool of laborers to draw from, after all.

She'd put in a good four hours of work and the sun was starting to get high, and she was starting to miss the lunch she didn't have enough ration cards for, when the first chopper buzzed over the horizon. She lifted her welder's mask to watch it pass, and saw that it was actually making a beeline for the nearest cleared area: the workyard. From the looks of it, it was about five or six years old - the same model she had been used to taking to and from drops, and seeing Marshall Petrikov zooming around in - and it was showing its age. But she doubted there'd been money in _any _budget for purchasing new ones, let alone R&D. The constant kaiju threat had pretty much shut down everything in that department.

So: military choppers. She didn't need to see the jaeger head stamped peelingly on their sides to know they were here for her. Turning on her jetpack, she dropped from her perch and slid down one of the beams, feeling little percussive bursts of air every five seconds or so, keeping her from reaching too high a velocity. She made her way to the ground that way.

As she passed through the skeleton of the wall and made her way into the warehouse, she noticed a group of workers gathered around a dusty, elderly television. She wondered why they weren't being barked at to get back to work, and then noticed the foreman was watching too, his mouth hanging open. She paused to take a look. What she saw sent a dull coil of despair arcing through her gut, though it was nothing she hadn't anticipated. Kaiju got bigger with every attack. There had to be a Category Four sometime.

But this…this thing was ripping through the Coastal Wall in Australia like it was nothing, sending water cascading through the barrier and into the Sydney harbor. "The enormous Category Four breached the Wall in less than an hour," the newscaster said, sounding panicked, "which the Wall's architects had previously deemed impossible."

"Why're we even building this thing?" someone shouted. _To make yourselves feel better, _Marceline thought but didn't say. _To make you able to sleep at night. There's only one thing that can truly protect against the kaiju, and that's…_

On cue, footage played of a slim, streamlined jaeger dealing quick – for a giant robot, anyway – blows to the jaw of the massive beast, which looked like an inverted hammerhead shark. It shoved the kaiju into a building and, while it was still struggling to recover, fired off six quick rockets from its chest, thumping into the beast and laying it flat. It didn't rise.

"After four hours, the kaiju was downed by jaeger Stryker Eureka, piloted by Ash and Maja Magus." Marceline growled a bit under her breath, hearing the first name. She and Ash had a bit of a history. She'd had a brief fling with him while she'd been in the corps until she'd realized what a psycho he was, which had taken about .5 seconds. He'd had all the signs of not getting over it easily – he'd stolen one of her most precious objects, the only toy she'd managed to keep during all her years of foster care, and it had taken her and Marshall a lot of work to get it back. Luckily they'd been transferred to different bases after training – her to Alaska, him to Australia – and she hadn't thought of him since. _Oh boy. This'll be fun. _

"The jaeger program was decommissioned because of mediocre pilots," Ash was saying to the camera. "This'll be Stryker Eureka's tenth kill to date. That's a new record, babe." He gave the reporter a smarmy grin.

Marceline couldn't watch any more of this, so she headed out past the watching crowd to the courtyard, where the helicopter blades were whipping the thin dusting of snow into a fine frenzy. Marshall Petrikov was stepping out of his helicopter, looking far thinner and greyer than he had since she'd last seen him. The stress of fighting a losing war for the last six years had clearly told on him. But his icy blue eyes still snapped with the same electricity she remembered, and she had to swallow the impulse to salute.

"Miss Abadeer," the Marshall said, by way of greeting. "It's been a while."

"Five years, four months," she allowed.

"May I have a word?"

Marceline turned, gesturing back towards the darkness of the workshop. "Step into my office."

Once inside, the chill was lessened, but not by much, so Marceline headed over near one of the huge smelting furnaces, where iron bars were being turned into the beams that made up this apparently useless artifact they were building. "Took me a while to find you," Petrikov said. "Where have you been?"

"Up here, mostly," Marceline said, digging at the dirt of the workshop floor with her iron-capped boot toe. She didn't really want to say more – she'd failed to anticipate just how painful this reminder of her past would be. But the Marshall was gazing at her keenly, and she found herself saying, "Been around a bit, too. Anchorage, Nome…a few places." She didn't like the feeling of being interrogated, though lord knows she was used to it from the Marshall – he had a way of making you feel like you were in the principal's office and the sooner you got it over with the easier it'd go for you – so she said shortly, "What do you want?"

Petrikov turned, making a show of examining the scaffolding, the smelting furnaces, the various workstations that made up the workshop, before he deigned to answer. "Spent the last six months reactivating everything I can get my hands on," he said, then turned to face her. "There's an old jaeger – Mark III – that needs a pilot. You may know it."

Marceline had to swallow hard before answering. "I'm guessing I wasn't your first choice."

"You were my only choice," said the Marshall, his gaze level and yet kind, like he knew what he was asking, or thought he did. But he had no idea. "All the other Mark III pilots are dead." Marceline had to clench her jaw hard at that, and turn away.

"Look…I can't have anyone else in my head again. I was still connected to Marshall Lee when he died. I felt his fear, his pain…and then all of a sudden it was gone, all of it, and that was worse. I can't let anyone else in that way again." Only the respect she had for the Marshall – and her fear of him – kept her from hitting him and running away, like she usually did when anybody tried to talk about her brother, or her past, or any of it. The only thing she could bring herself to say was, "I'm sorry." She started to walk away, knowing, of course, that he wasn't done.

The Marshall's voice rang through the vast space of the workshop, stilling her footsteps. "Haven't you heard, Miss Abadeer? The world is coming to an end. So where would you rather die? Here, on this frozen wall? Or in a jaeger?"

It all came flooding back then: the thrill of the hunt, the kill, the way her fist felt as it slammed into a kaiju's jaw and the flesh and bone gave way beneath it; the way her body felt charging the cannons and releasing; the screams and whoops of elation that had filled her helmet and the cockpit as she and Marshall Lee fought. The way she'd looked in her leather jacket, the way the boys (and girls) had looked at her as she walked (swaggered) into pretty much any bar, just how much of a _badass _she had felt. She'd felt like a rock star. She'd felt like a queen. All of that had been taken from her by a kaiju… And yet here was the Marshall again, offering her a chance to take it back.

But he had also put her at war with herself, as she was sure he was aware. He was giving her a chance to go through it all again – to relive her brother's death like it was not only yesterday, but _happening that very moment_. The phenomenon was called random access brain impulse triggers, or RABIT – the sensation of re-experiencing memories like they were happening in the present, and it was a very real danger in the drift. Usually you shared something with your copilot – blood, love, marriage – and they could prepare for your past traumas, anticipate them, help you work through them – but to drift with someone entirely unknown… It was theoretically possible, but highly dangerous. And chasing the RABIT was a good reason why.

Yet she knew, as the Marshall had likely known, that she was going to do it. She hated him a little bit for that, even as she packed her meager belongings into a duffel and slung them into a helicopter. But no Abadeer had ever shrunk from a fight, and she didn't intend to start. She'd get one last chance to die gloriously, and hopefully take a few of the bastards down with her.

It was only after the chopper had swung into the sky that Marceline even thought to ask where they were going. The Marshall, gazing out the window, simply answered, "Hong Kong."


	3. Chapter 3

**Ride the Drift**

**Viridicus**

**A/N: **I always wondered why they'd chuck Raleigh, who was clearly still messed up over the loss of his brother, and Mako, who was a complete n00b, into a jaeger together without any kind of simulator training. Like, did you really honest to god expect this to go well? So this is where you're really going to start to see the storylines diverge. For one thing, I'm giving them a more generous timeline; for another, here's where Marcy first meets PB! Speaking of which, I decided to stay in keeping with Pacific Rim's grimmer world, in which there's no way anybody would have the last name "Bubblegum" and in which nobody has time for princesses. Don't worry, she'll still get called Princess Bubblegum anyway. Wait and see how./evilgrin

**Chapter Three**

Marceline started sweating the minute the plane touched down in Hong Kong. She'd sweated in Alaska, working on the Wall, but that had been a cold sweat, the heat wicked away soon by the bone-chilling cold. This was humid heat, and it made her lungs, accustomed to northern climes, feel like they were being slowly filled up with water. They took a helicopter from the airport to the Shatterdome, just a quick hop. Marceline had slept fitfully on the plane over the sea – in truth, she didn't really sleep contentedly anymore. It was hard to, when you kept having the same dream.

But she was up and awake for the helicopter ride, overtired if she was being honest with herself, but it was a state she was used to. It had always been something she was good at, pushing away sleep until it was convenient, and it had proved useful: it had gotten her through thirty-six hour patrols in a jaeger and double and triple shifts on the Wall when she needed to make rent. When she stepped out of the chopper, it was raining, warm humid rain that felt amazing. She turned her face towards the sky and let it patter down, soaking herself in what felt like a warm bath. When she looked down again, she was being watched.

Her first impression of the girl was _pink. _It wasn't hard to see where she'd get that impression: the girl's hair was a burst of color in the grey landscape, where it peeked out from under her umbrella. She would have been cute if not for her frown and her ridiculous hair and the twist of her lips that just screamed _bossy. _This was a girl used to getting her way, and fighting like hell when she didn't. Marceline hoped she wasn't going to have much to do with her.

"Miss Abadeer, this is Bonnibel Bennett. Miss Bennett is leading our jaeger restoration team. She personally handpicked the candidates for your copilot."

Marceline refrained from groaning and held out her hand. "Hey."

Bonnibel (what kind of a stupid name was that?) considered her hand for a moment, then turned to Marshall Petrikov. "She's different than I expected."

Marceline blinked. "Um, hey, _she's _right here."

The Marshall was frowning at her. "Not now, Miss Bennett. We'll get inside and give Miss Abadeer the tour, and then you'll show her to her jaeger."

"But Marshall –"

"_Now_, Miss Bennett." He began walking towards the Shatterdome's airlock, trailing Marceline and Bonnibel. Marceline privately determined to figure out exactly what nickname Bonnibel Bennett would hate the most – and with a name like Bonnibel Bennett, she had a lot of material to choose from – and use it at every opportunity she got.

The girl was deferring to the Marshall, like absolutely everybody did, but there was something different in the way she was doing it, something less like duty and more like respect. Marceline squinted but couldn't tease it out. "Sir, I've been trying to tell you, there are anomalies in the latest seismographs – triggers that suggest some changes in the established patterns – if my calculations are correct –"

Who actually said that, _If my calculations are correct_? Marceline realized too late that she had let out a quiet snort. Bonnibel was glaring at her witheringly. "Did you have something to contribute, Miss Abadeer? Perhaps something terribly insightful about the kaiju threat?"

"Certainly nothing worthy of a brainlord like yourself," Marceline said sweetly.

Bonnibel opened her mouth to retort, looking enraged, but the Marshall said, "That's absolutely enough!" And together they stepped onto the elevator.

They heard two voices shouting, "_Wait_ _wait wait wait wait!" _Just before the blast doors had ground closed an odd couple squeezed themselves onto the elevator with them. One was a tall, lanky boy who looked about seventeen, with a shock of floppy blond hair peeking out from under an oddly-shaped (and certainly non-regulation) hoodie. The other was similarly blond, somewhat older and much shorter, his body almost tubby but with the suggestion of strength. They stood huffing and panting and dripping – Marceline noticed Bonnibel sidling carefully out of the way, and sneered – as the elevator began its descent, and the Marshall introduced them as "Finn and Jake Cobaka, pilots of the Ballistic Military Operations jaeger unit, a Mark IV."

"BMO for short!" Finn added. He had a cheerful, open face, almost like they weren't facing the end of humanity. Marceline wasn't sure whether it made her want to slap him or hug him.

"And this is Marceline Abadeer,"the Marshall said. "She'll be piloting the newly reconditioned Scream Queen."

Finn gaped openly. "That's so _cool! _I've actually got –" He rolled up the sleeve of his blue hoodie to show her a tattoo, a stylized kaiju head that was nonetheless very familiar.

"Yamarashi," she said, carefully keeping her voice level.

"Yep! You and your brother took him down in 2017! I watched the fight on vid. You finished him off with a _BAM _and a _POW _and –" He abandoned the English language for shadowboxing and sound effects. He had a better memory of the fight than Marceline did, but then again it was taking all her effort not to reach out and slam the kid into the elevator's wall. She turned away, searching for something to rest her eyes on that wasn't forcibly reminding her of Marshall Lee, and her eyes fell on Bonnibel. She looked almost…sympathetic. _Almost. _The odd pink girl turned quickly away.

Jake had also noticed Marceline's discomfort, and was working on calming his brother down. "C'mon, bro, she knows the fight. She fought it, for Pete's sake. Sorry bout that, Marceline, he's kind of a kaiju groupie. Means well, though, and he kills 'em well too."

This was shaping up to be the most awkward elevator ride Marceline had ever taken, but thankfully they'd reached the bottom. Bonnibel tried one more time with the Marshall – "If you could just come down to my lab for one _minute_, sir, just one minute, I could show you –" but Petrikov waved her away.

"Enough, Miss Bennett. I will look at your calculations later. Right now we need to give Marceline a tour of the facility and her jaeger, and then we can go over what you've found."

Bonnibel gave a furious little huff and stomped her foot – _actually stomped her foot! – _before whirling away down the corridor. Marceline waited a moment before saying, "So you're putting babies in jaegers now, Marshall?"

"I assume you're speaking of Finn and Jake," the Marshall said, "and they've proven themselves many times over. They held the Perimeter Wall in Russia alone in '22 until they got backup."

Marceline whistled. That _was_ seriously impressive. "Guess kids grow up fast these days. But no, I was actually speaking about Miss Bubblegum there."

The Marshall whirled on her and fixed her with the same icy gaze he'd used on her many a time, beneath which all of her bravado melted away. "_Miss Bennett _is one of the finest minds still left alive on this planet. She's the reason you _have _a jaeger. _Is that clear_, Miss Abadeer?"

Marceline ground her teeth, but had no choice but to say, "Yes, sir."

"Good. Now I'm going to show you to your room so you can stow your things, and then we will tour the facility."

At least, Marceline thought as she slung her duffel into the tiny room – barely big enough for a bed, a desk, and two steps – Bonnibel Bubblegum was a labcoat, a squint. With all luck, she'd only have to interact with her when something went wrong with the jaeger. And if she was as good as the Marshall said, that would hopefully be never.

As if he could read her mind, the Marshall added, "Oh and Miss Abadeer? Miss Bennett will be _personally _directing your simulator training, to get you back up to snuff before the selection of your copilot. You'll be spending quite a lot of time with her, so try to make yourself at least slightly agreeable."

This time Marceline couldn't help herself. "But _sir – " _

"You know my rule, Miss Abadeer. Buts are for bathrooms and nothing else. You will meet me in the jaeger bay at 1600 on the dot, and if you're late I will give Miss Bennett specific instructions to torture you."

Marceline waited until he was well out of sight to groan.

XXX

The jaeger bay was vast enough to take Marceline's breath. She was used to the size of the Alaskan base, which had held docking stations for five jaegers and enough workshops and warehouses so that two of them could be refitted at once. This bay was about six times as big, but what was most notable about it was not the size – it was the emptiness.

"At its height this bay could field thirty jaegers, but we only have four at this point. We've been working hard to scavenge enough parts to build a fifth, but…" The Marshall spread his hands, a seemingly careless gesture at odds with the gravity of his statement.

Marceline grimaced. "I didn't realize it was this bad."

The Marshall nodded. "We're careful to make sure most people don't."

The bay was full of people, rushing to and fro with carts of tools and supplies or conferring earnestly with each other. Sparks flew from the shoulders and necks and thighs of jaegers as machinists made improvements or repaired damage. The Marshall introduced her to a few people and she shook hands and grunted out pleasantries, but in large part their names and faces were a blur. She'd never been good at meeting people – she had her crew and they were practically family, and she was pretty satisfied with that. Except, over the years since Marshall, all of them were dead, as far as she knew.

One thing she noticed every person had in common was that they kept glancing up, towards something just above the bay doors through which she'd come. When Marceline finally looked that way herself, she saw a large digital clock, steadily counting down seconds, minutes, hours, and days. There were thirteen of those, and some change. The Marshall saw her looking. "Our war clock, Miss Abadeer. We reset it after every kaiju attack. The frequency of the attacks has been increasing. At this point we've got two weeks, if we're lucky." Marceline let out what she thought was a quiet curse, but apparently not quiet enough – Petrikov's nostrils flared, reminding her of a joke she and Marshall had used to share. They'd called him the Nose, both because of his especially long one and its ability to sniff out any sort of wrongdoing. Like the time when they'd decided they needed a break from training and snuck out of the barracks after hours. After a particularly eventful night on the town, they'd attempted to creep back in shortly before dawn. The Marshall had been there to open the door for them.

Marceline cracked a pained half-smile at the memory, but she didn't have long to reminisce – Petrikov was already leading her onward, towards one of the jaegers, where three men were playing an odd sort of basketball – two on one. "The Lemongrab triplets, pilots of the jaeger Lemonhope, out of Frankfurt. Full titanium core, no alloys, and fifty Diesel engines per muscle strand. A very deadly, precise fighter." The jaeger had three arms instead of the usual two, which explained the three pilots.

"Thundercloud formation?" Marceline said.

"Yes. They've successfully defended Hong Kong Bay seven times."

Petrikov introduced the triplets – Earl, Erwin, and Ernest – and Marceline successfully forgot which one was which the moment after it was explained. They all looked pretty much the same anyway. The triplets grunted back at them, but seemed generally uninterested in anything but their game.

Next up was BMO, a vast, boxy jaeger that had a cracked smile painted on it. "You've already met Finn and Jake." The two boys waved, Finn cheerfully calling something to Marceline that she couldn't understand over the noise of the bay. When she made a questioning face at him he waved her away.

"We'll see you at chow!"

"Don't let the appearance fool you, Miss Abadeer," the Marshall said as they passed. "It's a brutal war machine. It was originally piloted by their parents, Joshua and Margaret Cobaka. Under their stewardship, the Siberian Perimeter stayed unbreached for six years. When they died, their boys took over."

Marceline nodded. "I've heard of them. Didn't realize Finn and Jake were their kids, though."

"It's quite a legacy, but they've worked hard to live up to it."

They had come to the third jaeger now, the one she had least been looking forward to seeing. The Marshall either knew her history or sensed her reluctance, because he led them in a wide berth around it. "I believe you already know Ash Magus and his mother Maja." Much as she attempted to avoid Ash's gaze, Marceline couldn't help meeting it. He leered at her, which the Marshall didn't see. She was about to sneer back, but Petrikov said sharply, "I trust there won't be any trouble, Miss Abadeer." Marceline could only manage a huff, shoving her hands into her pockets.

"Stryker Eureka is the first and last of the Mark Vs," the Marshall said as they passed. "Fastest jaeger in the world. Australia decommissioned it right before the Sydney attacks. They were lucky it hadn't been dismantled yet. And now it's running point for us."

A question had been building in Marceline, ever since the Marshall had climbed out of his helicopter. Other things had seemed more important at the time, but now she wanted answers. She planted herself in front of Petrikov, arresting his long stride. "_What, _Miss Abadeer?"

"Running point for what?" Marceline demanded. "You still haven't told me what I'm doing here, what _any _of us are doing here. Why are you pulling jaegers from around the world where they could be defending any number of cities, and bringing them here?"

The Marshall looked at her, considering, and seemed to come to a decision. "We're going after the Breach." The stupidity of the idea made Marceline's jaw hang open. "We're going to strap a thermonuclear bomb to Stryker Eureka's back and detonate it in the Breach. We can't keep fighting this war, Miss Abadeer. We need to stop it for good."

"It's been tried before," Marceline argued. "Every time a jaeger goes through that breach, it doesn't come back, and the kaiju keep coming. What makes this time any different?"

But they had arrived in front of the last jaeger in the bay, and all of Marceline's questions flew out of her head. "Oh my god."

_The Scream Queen. _

The only thing that marred seeing the Scream Queen – arguably Marceline's first love – for the first time in six years, whole and unbroken, her black and red paint fresh and unscarred and the screaming vampire emblem on her chest redone, was the presence of Bonnibel Bubblegum Bennett, standing on the balcony towards which they were walking. She had some kind of tablet in her hand and was taking notes, watching the workers putting the finishing touches on the jaeger's shine. Much as Marceline didn't want to, she grudgingly had to admit, "She looks like new."

"Better than new," Bubblegum said, with a toss of her stupid pink hair. "She has a double-core nuclear reactor. She's one of a kind now."

Marceline did _not _like the proprietary tone in the girl's voice. "She always was," she snapped under her breath. Bubblegum colored violently and made to retort, but suddenly a voice from a long-ago past reached her ears, making her whirl.

"How do you like your ride, Abadeer? Solid iron hull, no alloys, forty-engine block muscle strands! Hyperdrive cores for each limb, and a new fluid synapse system!" It was Pepper, his salt-and-pepper-striped hoar a little more to the salt side now. Marceline, grinning, reached out to give him a hug.

"Good to see you, buddy."

To her annoyance, after he left her embrace, he hugged Bubblegum as well. "It's just like old times, and it's all thanks to this girl. Our heroine." Bonnibel smiled, displaying the first hint of warmth she'd seen from her all day.

"Mr. Butler, I'll need to see you in the control room," the Marshall said, clapping Pepper on the shoulder. "There's a few things we need to go over for tomorrow's test run."

Pepper nodded. "Sir, yes sir."

They began to walk off, and the Marshall threw over his shoulder, "Miss Bennett can finish briefing you on the improvements to your jaeger. Try to play nice." Marceline wasn't sure who his last statement was directed at, but she managed to keep from making a face until his back was turned.

There were a few more new features to the jaeger to go over, but Bonnibel dispensed with them with clinical efficiency. Yet despite her dryness, she couldn't keep a tone from creeping into her voice, something Marceline recognized from her own: a pure, honest love for jaegers. Grudgingly, she had to admit that somebody who talked that way about jaegers couldn't be _that _bad. And while she had no practical experience, had never drifted with a jaeger or fought a kaiju, her technical knowledge was worlds beyond Marceline's, discussing points of circuitry and optics and mechanics that went way over her head. If sciences were languages, Bonnibel would have been fluent in at least five. Maybe the respect the Marshall had asked for wouldn't be so hard to muster.

After Bonnibel had finished, she offered to escort Marceline back to her quarters, an offer Marceline gladly accepted, given that she knew she'd get lost in the Shatterdome's twisting warren of tunnels in a heartbeat. The pair of them made their way out of the bay and back down the hallways, conversing carefully about jaeger tactics and various different fights they'd seen or experienced. By the time they'd reached her bunk, Marceline wasn't sure how she had ever managed to stay away from jaegers for six years.

"Well, I guess this is me," she said, hand on the wheel that opened her door. "You really are a kaiju nerd, aren't you, Bubblegum?" The girl's face went bright crimson. Too late, Marceline realized what she'd said.

"_Don't _call me that," Bonnibel snapped. Stupidly, Marceline actually felt sorry and tried to apologize, but Bonnie didn't seem to want to hear it. "Dinner is at 1900 hours, and simulator training starts an hour after that. Don't be late." She whirled and disappeared into the room directly across from Marceline's.


	4. Chapter 4

**Ride the Drift**

**Viridicus**

**A/N: **Well, Marcy's certainly doing a great job at being a butt, isn't she? Don't worry, it won't last. Just working on building some seething mutual hatred that can turn into seething mutual sexual tension.

**Chapter Four**

Walking into the mess hall forcibly transported Marceline back to high school. The shitty food, the hundreds of blank, unfamiliar faces, the musical chairs that was trying to find somewhere to sit… She and Marshall had had plenty of experience being the new kids in school, what with moving from foster family to foster family and town to town, but they'd always ultimately had each other. Now she was totally alone.

After collecting her tray (and realizing how hungry she was, after approximately seventeen hours without eating anything), she scanned the sea of unfamiliar, vaguely familiar, and outright hostile people, trying to figure out where she'd make her first attempt. There had been a time when "jaeger pilot" had been synonymous with "rock star," but apparently that time was past. Here everybody had their job to do, their part to play, and Marceline was unproven. There was no reason anyone would deliberately seek her out, not yet anyway. Except for plain good humor and friendliness, and there seemed to be a distinct lack of that here.

Except, of course, for Finn, who seemed to be an unquenchable fountain of it. After just a few moments she noticed him waving frantically to her, standing in his seat next to his brother, who was trying to calm him down (a dynamic that seemed to be common with the two of them). Shaking her head and grinning despite herself at the kid's undaunted enthusiasm, Marceline made her way over to their table, where Finn welcomed her and loudly began introducing her to all of his friends. "And this is Cinna Bunn, and Tara Trunks, and Eleanor Samuel-Peters – just call her Elle S-P, everybody does – and Robbie Guy, and –"

Marceline did her best to greet each of them, but the crud on her plate was calling her name. She'd never been good at being hungry – it always turned her into a wild dog. Luckily, Jake seemed to notice, and said, "Hey brother, let her eat. We'll always have time to introduce her later."

Finn stopped abruptly, a little bit of uncertainty creeping into his wide blue eyes. "Oh yeah – sorry! I just get so excited sometimes. Jake says it's my – my what, Jake?"

Jake winked. "ADD, buddy. Awesome Dude Demeanor."

"Yeah, that. Anyway – what do you think of the Shatterdome, Marcy? Can I call you Marcy?"

The pet name had belonged to Marshall and Marshall alone. Once an old boyfriend had tried calling her that, and she'd casually promised to neuter him if he ever did it again. She couldn't say that to Finn, but it made her choke on her mouthful of soyburger and mumble, "Rather not." Finn looked hurt, so she hastened to clarify, "It's just – I lost someone I cared about, and he used to call me that. It's still kinda…"

"Got it!" Finn said. "I totally get that. Sorry, Marceline. I won't call you that again." She threw him a grateful smile and he beamed right back.

The conversation proceeded much more naturally after that. Marceline was relieved to find that Finn did most of the talking, allowing her to sit back and take in the proceedings. She'd been getting pretty close to feeling overwhelmed – this was more human interaction than she'd had in several years, as she'd lived alone in her postage stamp of an apartment and worked solo, going home as soon as her shift was over and staying there until the next one started. Sometimes she went out to bars and got shitfaced, but it was always alone, in the two or three dives that were close enough to stumble back from unassisted. She'd done her best to project a don't-fuck-with-me vibe for all comers, and it had worked well enough. There were always some assholes who felt that vibe and felt the need to test it, but without exception she'd passed those tests with flying colors.

But this wasn't the kind of environment where she could do the whole lone desperado thing, and if she was being honest with herself, it was played out. It actually felt _good _to have somebody care about her, about her thoughts and opinions and feelings, and she felt grateful for Finn's boundless optimism and good humor. She was also coming to appreciate Jake as well – just as friendly, in his slightly quieter way, as his brother, he had a sly kind of humor that jived well with her own. He was also clearly madly protective of Finn, even as he enjoyed teasing him.

Like now, for instance. "Hey bro, your princess arrives," he said to Finn, gesturing to someone behind Marceline's back. Marceline grinned as she watched the kid's face turn red as a beet, and turned herself to see Bonnibel Bennett walking into the mess.

"Princess, huh? I was thinking I'd call her Bubblegum, with that hair."

If it was possible, Finn reddened even further. "_Hey! _Don't say anything bad about her, okay?" Marceline raised her hands in mock surrender, laughing.

"Princess Bubblegum, huh? I like that," Jake mused, his eyes glinting with amusement. Finn turned to accost his brother, looking outraged.

"Dammit, Jake!"

As the brothers squabbled, Marceline turned back to observe Princess Bubblegum. For a moment it looked like she was considering sitting with them, but then her eyes met Marceline's. She turned nearly as pink as her hair and walked swiftly towards the chow line, where she greeted the servers with obvious familiarity. Marceline couldn't help but notice that she had the suggestion of a nice butt under her lab coat.

When she turned back, she had a paper bag in her hand – she'd obviously been negotiating to get her food to go. Finn let out a groan and slumped in his chair, and his brother patted him on the back almost gently.

After another twenty minutes of so of shooting the shit, Marceline was slumped in her chair too, feeling fuller than she had in years. The food wasn't good, but it was plentiful, and she'd been hungry for a while. And if she was being honest with herself, she'd also been hungry for friendship, or at least companionship, but that was well on its way to being sated as well.

A chime sounded, causing a ripple to run through the mess hall. "Well, dinner's over," Finn said lightly. "Time to hit the sim room and then the rack!"

Marceline groaned, remembering her own simulator date with Bubblegum. "Any chance you guys can show me where it is? I'm supposed to be there like now."

Jake whistled. "You're late already? The princess is gonna have your hide. But yeah, you can follow us. You're probably gonna be using the machine in her lab, but it's near enough to the main simulator room that you can walk with us."

Finn moaned enviously. "_I _wanna have solo simulator time with Bonnibel!"

Marceline snorted. "Be my guest. She's not my biggest fan."

Jake snickered. "Oooh boy, you're gonna be in for some fun. C'mon guys, let's stow our trays. We're gonna be late."

XXX

Princess Bubblegum's lab was nothing like what Marceline had expected. It was a _mess_, for one thing, one side of the room cluttered with kaiju entrails and glowing green tubes floating with unmentionables, and the other with what looked like miles of blackboards full of unintelligible calculations. Just looking at them made Marceline's eyes water.

In the back corner of the room was a familiar black box, something like a cross between a photo booth and an arcade game. A helmet with a pair of rubberized goggles rested on a stand, wires and tubing running out from it like dozens of brightly colored threads. A simulator. Marceline hadn't been in one of those for six years. She approached it with trepidation, calling out quietly, "Miss Bennett? You in here?"

Bonnibel popped out from behind the machine, flushed and sweaty and obviously having been tinkering with something. Dirt was smudged across her nose in a way that made Marceline's stomach flip oddly. They both looked at each other for an awkward second, and then Bonnibel said, with a pink flush that seemed to be characteristic, "You're twelve minutes and sixteen seconds late. You won't be again."

Marceline saluted sardonically. "Yes princess!"

The nickname made the girl flush even harder. "Don't call me that. Are you familiar with simulator protocol?"

Marceline let just a little bit of swagger into her gait as she made her way over to the black box. "Princess, I've been _familiar with simulator protocol _since you were in middle school. Lay it on me." As she made her way over to the console, she let herself brush up just the tiniest bit against Bonnibel. The girl let out a little squeak and jumped aside, and Marceline had to curtail a snigger. Pushing this chick's buttons was just too easy.

But while Bubblegum might have been discomfited, this was her domain, not Marceline's, and she recovered quickly. "What was your rank before you left the service? Captain? Well, let's have an agreement, _Captain Abadeer_. You won't be calling me any nicknames, and I won't tell Marshall Petrikov what a rude, disrespectful bitch civilian life has turned you into. You'll address me as Miss Bennett, and I will address you as Captain Abadeer. You're a professional. Start acting like one."

Marceline was a bit floored. Who knew the pink chit had so much spine? To cover up her shock she cracked her knuckles, strapped herself into the simulator harness, and took hold of the helmet, buckling it under her chin. Bonnibel turned and started calibrating the simulator, manipulating the controls with deft hands. As the girl reached over her to turn a dial, Marceline took another opportunity to observe her ass, this time not covered up by the lab coat. She'd been right – it really was fine. She grinned, thinking of Marshall. No doubt he would've had the same assessment (pun totally intended). It wouldn't have been the first time they'd caught each other chasing after the same girl (or guy). The Abadeer twins' tastes tended to run similarly.

If only Bonnibutt weren't such a priss. As the princess finished making her preparations, Marceline snapped the goggles down over her eyes. The darkness was welcome to her overtired brain. She only had a few minutes to enjoy the relief, though – Bubblegum's voice soon crackled through the headset, making her grimace. "Mic check."

"You're on."

"Miss Bennett."

"Whatever."

"Captain, if you're to regain your abilities it's important to observe the proper protocol –"

"Okay fine, fine – _Miss Bennett_. You happy?"

"I wouldn't call it that, but that's acceptable. I'll be starting you off easy today – nothing too strenuous, just getting you used to the feeling of the drift. You'll be piloting the jaeger up and back along a two-mile stretch of coastline. Please place your hands in the simulator gloves whenever you're ready."

Marceline reached forward and pushed her hands into two rubbery holes in the console, grasping the metal handles she found inside. The device would move and rock to approximate what it felt like piloting a jaeger, and so would the harness she was sitting in, though it never really matched the real thing. She and Marshall had nearly crashed the Scream Queen on their first real run – the simulator could shake you up pretty good, but it was nothing like being jacked into the harness in the cockpit of a real jaeger, feeling it rock with the surf and the punishment of the sleet. And that wasn't even thinking about the blows of a kaiju.

"I'm going to start the simulator now. Prepare to drift. And remember, Marceline, the random access brain impulse triggers won't be as intense when you're not drifted with another pilot, but there will still be danger. Stay focused."

"I know enough not to chase the RABIT," Marceline grunted. "And whatever happened to _Captain Abadeer _anyway?" She could almost hear the girl blush, and grinned into the darkness of the helmet.

"My apologies, Captain. Prepare for drift in three…two…one…"

There was a faint whirring noise and all of a sudden Marceline was several hundred feet above the Alaskan coastline, looking out through the eyes of a jaeger. Snow was flurrying around her and waves were batting at her feet, and the recognition of the scene was so sharp it brought tears to her eyes. It was six years ago, and no time had passed. "Holy shit…"

"Focus, Captain Abadeer. Your mission is simple: patrol up and down the coastline." The voice was disruptive, crackling through her headset, bringing Marceline back to the present.

"Uh, right." She forced herself to take one step, feeling the drag at her legs as the harness simulated the jaeger's resistance. She wobbled unsteadily. At the height of her training she could step into the jaeger's head and inhabit its body like it was her own, but she'd been out of practice for nearly six years. It was like relearning how to walk after a bad accident.

_Focus_, she told herself. _The sooner you get this over with, the sooner you won't have to hear Princess Bubblegum's voice in your head_.

As if she could hear her thoughts, the princess snapped, "Do you want to start moving, Captain Abadeer, or are we going to be here all night?" Marceline narrowly avoided snarling "Fuck you" and took another step.

This wasn't so bad, she decided as she started building a steady walking pace. She was even getting used to the way the waves pulled at the jaeger's legs and the sand shifted under its toes. She took a moment to observe the landscape, noting hills and valleys that she recognized from the years she had patrolled this very stretch of beach. There was the Wall, running along her right side, and if she turned her head – the jaeger did so, with a slow complaint of metal – she could see the base, nestled in that cleft just beyond…

"-can't wait to get back to base and get some grub. Kiah said she's cooking up something special just for me."

The voice was right beside her and in her head all at once. Marceline turned her head – her real head, not her jaeger's – and he was there, a grinning blue-tinged neural ghost, on her right side, like he'd always been. "_Marshall_," she breathed. She heard Princess Bubblegum's voice wittering in her ear like a gnat and brushed it aside.

"Whatever, man, she's too easy. She'll jump anything with a pulse. I'd say you're wasting your time with that one," she heard herself say, and Marshall Lee's familiar guffaw answered it.

"Dude, you're _jealous!_"

"Am not!"

"Are too!"

"Am not!"

Bonnibel was saying something about shutting the simulator down if she couldn't keep her focus, but Marceline could only focus on her brother, on the warm glowing feeling it put in her chest to see her brother and feel him alive again, here in the cockpit of a jaeger with her. And yet her joy turned to terror as a humongous solid shape smashed into them, throwing them sideways. Seawater was pouring through the cockpit – her left arm was burning – and a massive claw was reaching in and grabbing Marshall Lee out. She screamed again and again and again, and there were warning lights flashing everywhere and a voice shouting at her that she was going to shut down the simulator – and all of a sudden everything went black.

Marceline ripped the helmet off her head and tore at the harness's restraints with shaking hands. She couldn't quite manage the straps herself, but warm hands brushed hers away and freed her to fall to the floor, onto her hands and knees. She stared at the dirty concrete, sweating and shaking, saliva filling her mouth. She wondered if she was going to throw up and decided she was. Her vomit splattered disgustingly into a metal bin that had somehow made its way under her head.

"Well," said a voice from above and to her left, "I would say that was the textbook definition of a disaster." Bonnibel would have been well within her rights to gloat, seeing Marceline's ego brought so low, but her voice held nothing but a small trace of what might have been pity. Marceline didn't want it. She clambered to her feet.

"We're going again." She reached for the helmet.

"Absolutely not," the princess said, brushing her away with surprising strength that Marceline definitely wouldn't have expected from such a brainlord. "You look like the undead and if I didn't know you'd been awake for seventeen hours I would send you to the infirmary. Get some sleep and we'll try again at 0800. Breakfast's at 7." She was being nice enough to make Marceline feel like an asshole. She wondered if that was on purpose.

"Whatever you say, princess," she said, but without malice – it just kind of slipped out like it was natural. Bonnibel opened her mouth to retort, but something in Marceline's face made her forbear.

"Can you find your way back to your bunk? I need to recalibrate the simulator. You kind of did a number on it." Marceline turned to see it was smoking lightly.

"Huh, guess I did. Yeah, I'll find it. Sorry bout that." She rested a hand on Bonnibel's shoulder and felt the girl shiver lightly under her touch. "See you at 0800."


	5. Chapter 5

**Ride the Drift**

**Viridicus**

**A/N: **Hoo boy do I have a treat for you today! That's all I'm gonna say. I think you're gonna like this one though.

**Chapter Five**

She awakened to a sound she knew very well: muffled arguing. Usually it tended to mean her forcible removal from some place or another.

She slowly peeled herself out of bed, stifling a groan. Her head pounded like there was a storm-tossed ocean inside of it. Carefully and achingly she made her way to the door, where she pressed her ear against it. The steel was thick, and she was only able to catch phrases. But in this case, phrases were enough. It was Bubblegum and the Marshall.

"- a wreck, a derelict, out of shape –"

"Then you will have to get her in shape –"

"Unfocused, undisciplined, and clearly psychologically still –"

" – have no other _choice_. Can only work with what we –"

" – _dangerous _to let her in that jaeger!"

Marceline had heard enough. With a couple of sharp twists she wrenched the door open and took one step down to the main floor, yawning and stretching exaggeratedly. "Morning, Marshall – Miss Bennett."

The girl had jumped at her sudden appearance, but the Marshall only eyed her narrowly. "Good morning, Miss Abadeer. Miss Bennett has just been informing me of your performance on the simulator. The results were not encouraging; I trust a good night's sleep will aid with your improvement. Now please excuse me; you are both late for breakfast and I need to meet with the Maguses to discuss our operations. Miss Abadeer, please put some clothes on, and Miss Bennett, stop staring."

Bonnibel turned yet again as pink as her hair and hurriedly averted her gaze. Marceline grinned under heavy-lidded eyes. "Oops, silly me," she fairly purred. "My apologies, Marshall. You live alone long enough you forget certain things." She had walked out of her bunk having "forgotten" to put on a shirt. Sneaking a peek at Bubblegum under cover of waving the Marshall off, she noticed the girl's eyes roving furiously over her body, lingering especially on her scars, which trailed down the left side of her neck, under her bra, and disappeared into the waistband of her spandex. When she was sure the Marshall was out of earshot, she turned back to Bubblegum. "See something you like, princess?"

Another blush. Getting those out of her was so easy it was becoming addictive. "N-no," Bonnibel squeaked, half-turning away to regain her composure. "I'll see you at 0800, _Captain _Abadeer." She didn't say Marceline's rank like an honorific; she said it like an accusation.

Marceline dressed quickly and made it to the mess hall around 0830, just in time to catch Finn and Jake piling their plates with second breakfast. She ate light this time, remembering what the simulator had done to her last night, but grabbed a couple pieces of fruit – they actually had fresh fruit here! Incredible! – and shoved them in the pockets of her fatigues before heading out the door. Fun as it might have been to tease her she had no desire to give Bubblegum any kind of leverage over her with the Marshall, at least in the form of lectures about her punctuality. She'd had enough of those from him already.

On her way out the door she tripped. An unremarkable occurrence for some, but she had always been very surefooted, and in her experience whenever she tripped it meant somebody had tripped her. She came up with her fists halfway to fighting position and saw Ash. He was laughing. "Jeez, easy, killer! C'mon, Marceline, I just wanted to say hi. Don't I get a hug?"

She shoved him aside. "Oh hell no. Not in the mood for this bullshit. Not this early in the morning."

He followed her, keeping pace even as she lengthened her strides. "C'mon, Abadeer, I just wanna be friends. No hard feelings 'bout, uh, what was that thing called? Hambone?"

"_Hambo_," she gritted out, and wished there was some way to lock her door from the outside. "Fuck off, Ash."

He stopped, raising his hands like he was warding off a blow. "Woah, hey, no need to be such a bitch. We're all working this job together, right? Well, I'm sure I'll see you around. Make sure you get front row seats next time I get a kaiju kill." He turned left, she turned right, and he was gone.

She stomped her way to Bonnie's lab, cursing a blue streak. When she entered the princess was looking expectantly at the clock. "Well, Captain, I can see we're getting off to a fine start. Tell me, were you planning on arriving late to everything? Like kaiju attacks, for example?"

Marceline let out an inarticulate snarl of rage and brushed past her, making for the simulator. Bubblegum's voice cracked out like a whip, arresting her progress.

"We're not doing the simulator today."

Marceline whirled on Bonnibel, fists shaking with the effort of controlling herself. "What do you mean we're not doing the simulator? How am I supposed to get back into fighting shape if –"

"You're clearly in no place to be anywhere near the drift," the princess said calmly. "You're keyed up and emotional and it would be incredibly dangerous to let you into the sim. Instead," she said, gesturing towards a pair of blue mats squeezed onto the one uncluttered spaceon the lab floor, "we will be meditating. Clearing our minds and refocusing our bodies so we can enter the drift safely."

"Rookie bullshit," Marceline spat. "Seriously, princess? I haven't meditated in eleven years."

"That much is obvious," Bonnibel said archly, settling herself onto one of the mats. "However, I do it myself with some regularity and find it very helpful for regulating my emotions and keeping myself on an even keel. And since I have the simulator key…" She dangled it off the end of one finger, and dropped it into the front of her shirt when Marceline made a grab for it. They shared a tense look, the princess's face almost daring Marceline to come and get it, but Marceline wasn't going to bite. All the fight went out of her in a rush as she dropped to the mat opposite Bubblegum, groaning.

"Okay, _fine, _let's get this over with. How long do we have to do this for?"

"Not telling. But I _can _assure you that the longer you persist in acting like a child the longer we will be here. Now I assume you still remember the proper meditation position. If so, please assume it."

Grumbling, Marceline straightened herself to sit before Bubblegum, legs crossed. "Yes sir Miss Bubblegum sir."

"What was that?"

"Nothing," she said quickly.

"Then close your eyes."

"Sir yes sir."

"_Captain –"_

"All right, all right, jeez." Marceline closed her eyes.

"Now I need you to relax," Bonnibel began.

"Something tells me that the best way to get me to do that is not by beginning with an imperative."

"_Marceline!_"

Marceline didn't know what was wrong with her. She knew she was dragging out this exercise far longer than it needed to be, but it was like she was physically incapable of not tormenting Bubblegum. Like she actually couldn't help it. _C'mon_, she tried to reason with herself. _You _hate _this girl. The sooner you get this over with, the less time you have to spend with her. Shut up, sit down, and do this right. Hell, you might even get in a nap when she's not looking. _

"Okay, okay, I'll be good, I'm sorry." She closed her eyes again to Bonnibel's exasperated sigh.

"Now I want you to focus on the blackness behind your eyes. Focus on it and let everything else fall away. Feel yourself falling into it. Let yourself go." Her voice, far from its usual stiff, prickly, I-swallowed-a-dictionary-for-breakfast-this-morning-and-three-science-textbooks-for-lunch tone, was actually oddly soothing. In another lifetime, or another universe, Bonnibutt could have been, like, a yoga instructor or something. Marceline's nose itched. She shifted her hips uncomfortably instead of scratching it.

The truth was, she didn't want to sink into the dark space behind her eyes. Dark things lurked there, things with too many teeth and too many eyes and _jaws that bite, claws that catch_… Things that had taken her brother from her. She gritted her teeth against those memories, imagining herself falling further past them, dodging each one as she went down. This was, of course, the opposite of relaxing.

Again, Bonnibel's sigh, but it wasn't harsh and aggravated. If anything, it had that odd sympathetic tone that Marceline sometimes detected. "Permission to touch you, Captain?"

Marceline jumped, startled entirely out of the beginnings of the trance. "_What?_"

The girl was bright red. "I just mean – there's something one of my trainers used to do. It aids with meditation and relaxation. It's nothing – I mean, I won't do it if you don't want me to – I just think it might help if –"

Marceline made herself relax, focusing on each muscle group at a time. "Um…yeah, I guess. As long as it's not anything freaky." She winked, licking one canine. If anything, the girl turned redder.

"_No! _I mean, I'm just going to be touching your shoulders. And your face, if that's all right."

"Whatever floats your boat, princess –"

"Oh my god. There's seriously nothing anybody can do with you, is there?" She started getting up. "That's it. I'm gonna tell the Marshall."

"No, wait." A spike of fear lanced through Marceline all of a sudden, making her dart her hand out to grab Bonnibel's, yanking her back down to the mat. Time might have dulled her reflexes, but not by much. She didn't want to be thrown out of the Shatterdome. The military had been the one place that had taken her back. She couldn't lose that, couldn't lose jaegers, couldn't lose the last connection she had to Marshall.

Bonnibel was staring at their interlocked fingers. Marceline quickly dropped her hand. "Look, I'm sorry. It's just…hard for me to be back here, y'know? The last time I was in a jaeger my brother died. I felt his life go out in my head." Bubblegum looked away; Marceline took that to mean she wasn't buying the troubled victim act. It made desperation burn in her chest. "I'm gonna do whatever it takes, okay? I'm –"

When Bonnie turned back to regard her, her blue eyes were blazing with an emotion Marceline couldn't read. "Then _do _it, okay? Stop fucking talking about it, stop teasing me, and _do _it. Avenge him. I would do _anything _to take back what they took from me. But you're just sitting here cracking jokes and acting like an idiot with all the time in the world, and we don't _have _that kind of time. A lot of people could lose a lot more than a brother if we can't get your jaeger in some kind of fighting shape. Like, everything. We could all lose everything."

You could have heard a pin drop in that lab. They held that silence for a good thirty seconds. Then Bonnibel let out a sigh that whooshed with all the tension in the room. "Are you ready to work or what?" Marceline could only nod. "Okay. Close your eyes." Marceline did.

"All right. Focus on the darkness again, but imagine it's like liquid. You can breathe, and it's perfectly temperate, and you don't feel the need to move. You're slowly sinking down, but you can rise to the surface instantly at any moment if you need to. Got it?" Marceline nodded again.

Warm hands were suddenly at her shoulders, kneading out knots of tension that had held their places for years. The hands doing it were alien and strange, but Marceline had to admit that it felt _good _to be touched in a way that wasn't rough or unwitting. Beyond good, really. It felt needed. She had to stifle something that was either a yawn or a moan. That would have really ratcheted up the tension in the room, and she could tell she was on her last chance with Bonnibel.

"You're floating downward. As you do you feel each piece of tension, each troubling thought or memory, floating away from you like so much flotsam."

Every kaiju she'd ever fought. The years in the system, a different home, a different family every year, the looks of trepidation on their faces as she and Marshall Lee arrived on their doorstep, heightened the older they got. Like there was something _wrong _with them, that nobody had taken them in yet. That they weren't wanted.

"It's all falling away from you, and you're continuing to float downward, a little faster but still at a leisurely pace. The liquid is warm, and comforting. It cradles you. It holds you." The hands moved up from her shoulders to her neck, teasing out the origins of a thousand tension headaches. Her neck had always been a sensitive spot, and when Bonnie's hands reached it, every hair on her body stood up. Now she really was having trouble not making noise. A lot of impulses inside of her screamed to stop this now, she was getting in too deep and she was letting Bonnibel in with her, but she ignored them. This was scary but it felt good.

"You're reaching your center now, the place from which and to which everything flows. You'll find it there: your inner core. Your reason. What wakes you up in the morning and puts you to sleep at night. Picture it. Envision yourself floating into it, merging with it. Let it fill you with its purpose."

The hands were at her temples now and god they were so soft but so strong, and it seemed like they could take away every bad thing, every harsh word, every blow she'd ever weathered. She could have kissed those hands and the girl they belonged to. Before she could stop herself a stifled noise escaped her lips. The hands went away, making Marceline want to snatch them back. "Did I hurt you? I'm sorry –"

"N-no…um…you're fine. Don't stop." Bonnibel seemed to have taken away her command of the English language.

"Uh, okay." Carefully she replaced her fingers, easing them up under Marceline's hairline and making her shiver. _Jesus god, _she whispered to herself. There was no way she could concentrate on meditating now.

"Let your inner core fill you with radiant light. Find a place within yourself that it can settle into, and then kick off from the center. You're rising through the liquid, slowly but surely towards the surface. The light of purpose chases the bad things away."

Nope, completely distracted. This was the absolute best scalp massage, or anything massage, she'd ever experienced, and she'd had a brief fling with dating a masseuse. And then there was a gentle but persistent pressure against her back, something soft, and a lightbulb went off in her brain. _Boobs! _

Whoops.

"You rise higher and higher. On the count of five you will break the surface. Five…four…three…two…one. You can open your eyes."

Marceline didn't want to, if it meant Bonnibel was going to stop doing that thing with her scalp. She bit back a groan when the hands removed themselves from her hair, struggling a bit when they tangled with the thick black mass. Bonnibel sidled back around to her mat and rested there on her knees, looking at her curiously. "How are you feeling?"

_Horny _would have been the correct answer, as well as _boneless_. Both of them were sure to send Bonnie running for the hills, though, and ruin the possibility of ever getting treatment like this again. "Uh, good," she said, her voice a croak. "Really…relaxed. Yeah. Totally ready for the simulator now." _And a cold shower. _

"Really?" The girl brightened. "I mean, it's almost lunchtime, we should probably –"

"Nope, totally ready." Marceline bounced to her feet. "Raring to go." Beating on kaiju – at least in a simulated fashion – was the best medicine for dealing with tension in her book.

Bonnibel narrowed her eyes. "Uh huh."

"Yep. Totally."

"I'll be the judge of that. You're acting a little spacey, and I don't want you crashing my sim machine again." Marceline started squawking out a protest, but Bonnibel held up one insanely talented hand and she shut up immediately. It seemed like there wasn't a whole lot she wouldn't do for those hands. "Take an hour break, get some lunch, and I'll see you back here at 1300." She was halfway out the door when she heard Bonnibel say, "Oh and Captain? Don't be late again."

**A/N: **Well that escalated quickly. Don't worry, this won't turn into a smutfic. Not yet anyway (hehehehehe). But Marcy needed to be taught a lesson and given a good incentive to stop acting like such a butt. We'll get back to plotty stuff in the next update.


	6. Chapter 6

**Ride the Drift**

**Viridicus**

**A/N: **Kinda been struggling with what to call Lady Rainicorn, because obvs that's not a name that flies in the Pacific Rim universe. But eventually I decided I'd just call her Rain, my headcanon being that her parents were hippies.

**Chapter Six**

"Hey Marceline, are you okay?"

"What? Uh huh. Yeah. Why?"

"Well, you've been staring into space for the last ten minutes, you have food but you haven't eaten anything, and you got a little bit of drool right in the corner there…"

Marceline reflexively swiped at her mouth and found nothing. Jake sniggered, and she tossed him a glare without any heat. "Sorry. I'm just kinda tired. Dealing with Princess Bubblegum has been wearing me out."

She noticed Finn staring at her enviously. "How's it been going with Bonnibel?"

Marceline sighed. The correct answer was _complicated_, but she chose to go with, "Difficult. She can really be a stickler for silly little things like punctuality, y'know?"

"Man, I know," said Jake. "She once laid into me for being two minutes late for breakfast. _Two minutes! _But I can kind of understand it. When you lose your family like that, it makes sense that you wouldn't wanna waste any kind of time, you know?"

Marceline opened her mouth to ask him to explain, but before she could get the words out a bright sunny grin had spread across Jake's usually calm face. As he rose in his seat, Marceline turned to see him hailing a tall, willowy blonde girl in oil-stained coveralls who was walking towards them, holding a tray. "Hey, lady!" Jake said as she approached, and then told Elle S-P to budge over, which she did, grumbling under her breath. The girl took a seat next to him and kissed him on the cheek.

"Hey Marceline, this is my lady, Rain. Rain, this is Marceline Abadeer. She just got here yesterday. And she's gonna be piloting the Scream Queen!"

"That's wonderful!" Rain said, her voice lightly accented. "Have you met Bonnibel Bennett yet? She and I have been collaborating in her restoration – she's quite brilliant."

"So I keep being told," Marceline said, earning herself a growl from Finn. "Nah, she's cool. We've just been butting heads a bit is all. So are you a mechanic, or…?"

Rain smiled. "Crew chief for the Scream Queen, actually. I've always loved working on Mark IIIs, so it's been a pleasure making sure she's back to fighting shape. Which she will be soon. We're just having a little bit of difficulty integrating the third muscle strand on the thigh with the fourth and fifth, but we should have her ready for maneuvers by next Wednesday."

Marceline let out a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding. There was still a part of her that was worried this had all been a dream, that she'd been getting her hopes up for nothing and that she would never find herself back in the cockpit of her jaeger. To cover it up, she said, "So how'd you get into this biz?" Everyone had an origin story; the kaiju had made sure of it.

"My dad had a shop in San Francisco where he restored vintage American muscle cars, and he let me help him out. I actually wanted to skip college and start working there full time, but my mom insisted. I was going to Stanford for mechanical engineering in the fall, when the kaiju came." Rain smiled wistfully, then brightened. "But if it hadn't happened, I would never have met my Jakey pup." She leaned over to give Jake a kiss. He squirmed and pretended to be upset about the nickname, talking back to her in halting Korean, but Marceline could tell he was crazy about her.

"Don't tell anybody," Finn whispered, "but they're engaged indefinitely. They say they're gonna get married when the kaiju are gone." Marceline smiled at him, but it was kind of a strange thought to have: when the kaiju were gone. They'd been the wolves at the world's gates for ten years, had changed the face and the shape of it until it seemed like there was nothing beyond the kaiju, beyond fighting them and being killed by them. Even though she'd lived nearly eighteen years before they'd come, it was kind of strange to consider the idea that there could be a world without them.

Still feeling a strange combination of overly relaxed and charged like a plasma cannon, Marceline made her way back to Bubblegum's lab with time to spare. When she knocked on the door almost meekly Bonnibel gave her an odd look, but Marceline shot her one back that asked, Are you really gonna protest my timeliness? Bonnibel said nothing about it.

"If you're feeling up to it, I was thinking we could try the simulator again. Same mission as before, just up and back. But you really need to make sure to focus on this mission and nothing more. Okay?"

"Sure," Marceline said, noticing the princess's look of shock at the lack of a snarky response and musing that sometimes surprise was the best retort. _Sometimes. _

Getting herself strapped back into the simulator harness, Marceline jumped a bit as those small, strong hands busied themselves with testing her connections and eventually lifted the helmet to her head. "Don't get cocky, okay? That was your problem last time."

"My problem last time was that I saw my dead brother like he was alive, okay?" Marceline couldn't help snapping, then sighed. "Sorry. It's still a touchy subject."

The goggles were over her eyes already but she heard Bonnibel sigh in response. "I know. But we don't have time for it to be a touchy subject. You can either do this or you can't, and the Marshall is wasting time and resources trying to get you into fighting shape when he could be turning those resources towards training someone else who won't have the same problems."

Marceline gritted her teeth. "I know."

"Then prove yourself worthy of his regard." The warmth of those hands was abruptly gone, leaving Marceline to wonder how somebody with such talented fingers could be such a bitch. Then again, she thought, she'd known other people with good hands who'd been bitches too. That train of thought, of course, led to some dangerous tracks, and apparently Bonnibel was reading the meters because her voice sounded in Marceline's head.

"Okay, Captain, not a great start. Your breathing is up and so is your heart rate so I need you to focus on relaxing." A pause. "Please."

Marceline let out a breath. "Sure." She was glad, and not for the first time, that the only person who could truly know her thoughts was her partner in the drift, which at the moment she didn't have. Anyone monitoring a jacked-in pilot's meters could tell that their blood was pumping, their neural impulses were spiking, and their hands were sweating, but they wouldn't know why. That awkwardness was left for your copilot alone. She'd already been used to sharing pretty much everything with Marshall, so there hadn't been much ground left to uncover, and they'd gotten used to the random horny, hungry, stupid thoughts that floated through one another's brains on occasion. But she recoiled from the idea of sharing that kind of closeness with someone she hadn't even met yet.

"Okay, looks better. I'm going to start the simulation now."

"Aye aye, princess."

This time, just a sigh. It sounded like Bubblegum was getting resigned to that moniker at least.

The breathtaking, snow-lashed landscape of the Alaskan coastline swam into her vision again, and she relished the height her jaeger afforded her, scanning the hills and valleys that were in view and staring out to sea. But not for long – Bonnibel's voice brought her back to task. "Okay, Marceline, take it nice and easy. Let's do it right this time."

At the sound of her voice, or maybe her words, Marceline found that she was burning with the determination to do just that. Her fists clenched, and her jaeger's followed. "Ready on your orders."

"Move out." Was that a hint of surprise? Marceline grinned in the darkness of the helmet. It turned out that surprising Bonnibel Bennett was almost as fun as teasing her.

She lifted her leg and the jaeger took a step, hundreds of tons of metal and machinery powered by just her simple human muscles. Then another, then another, until she'd built up a rhythm, one they'd referred to at the Training Academy as marching pace. It was for traveling long distances without wearing out your mechanics – like if circumstances dictated you couldn't be dropped particularly close to your target, as in the case of one of her fights. It had been Yamarashi, actually – the kaiju had managed to make it to Tokyo before a jaeger could be dispatched to deal with it, and her superiors hadn't known the extent of the city's evacuation, so they were loath to drop them into the midst of potentially populated zones. They had dropped them several miles out at the bottom of the island, and they'd had to march for much longer than usual before they were able to do battle with the monster.

"Marceline," came Bubblegum's voice in a warning tone, snapping her out of her memory. Memories were dangerous things in the drift – you tended to get sucked into them, and to re-experience them like they were happening that instant. That was how you got chasing the RABIT, and it was usually your copilot's job to tell when you were starting to do that and warn you off. It could be dangerous for both pilots, though: one pilot's fugue state could often trigger another's, and if you weren't careful you could find yourselves both chasing the RABIT, completely insensate to the world while a kaiju dismantled your jaeger.

Bonnibel was providing that function to Marceline now, and Marceline was grateful. "Sorry," she grunted, unwilling to show it, but she shook her head and the memory cleared. Little bits and pieces of it lingered, though – it flickered in her vision as she crossed the snowy shore, and she could feel Marshall Lee ghosting around at the edges of her consciousness, tinged blue.

There was one time – only one – when she was honestly in danger, when Marshall stood next to her fully formed and opened his mouth to speak. But instead of his voice she heard Bonnibel's: "_Marceline! _Don't chase it! Come on!" And she mustered herself and pulled away, muttering, "It's not you. I know it's not you." And Marshall was gone. The sensation made tears prick at her eyes, but she refused to let them fall.

She had reached the agreed-upon point and stood on it, a low hill, watching the snow swirl around her. "Great job," she heard crackle through her headset, with what sounded slightly like enthusiasm seeping through the usually clinical tone. "Now come back to base."

Marceline took one last sweeping look at the landscape, enjoying how peaceful it was without any kind of threat, and found herself thinking about Jake and his lady. They were planning to get married when the kaiju were gone…how long had it been since anybody had thought about a time when the kaiju were gone? How long since anyone had thought about anything other than surviving the next attack? She shook her head and her body jounced as the jaeger's head mirrored hers. It was irresponsible to be thinking that way, especially when one of you was a jaeger pilot. She knew firsthand how short their lives could be. But she couldn't deny the idea had a tingle of romance to it too.

_Now you _need_ to get out of this sim, Abadeer_, she thought to herself, _if you're thinking about _romance. Who had time for that crap anymore? All of her relationships, if you could call them that, since she'd joined the military had been quick and dirty, and that was how she liked it. There was no sense in planning for or worrying about the future if you couldn't be certain day to day whether you were even going to _have _a future. It was definitely the time to put the kibosh on this line of thought, and she had pretty much reached base anyway. The drift had a tendency to make you introspective if you weren't careful, a quirk that Marceline had forgotten about but was swiftly relearning.

"Destination reached, Miss Bennett," she said.

"Excellent. I'm going to end the simulation. Prepare to leave the drift in three…two…one…"

Marceline closed her eyes. There was a flash of light behind them, and then darkness. When she opened them again the real world had reappeared, with Bonnibel Bennett front and center, holding the goggles and looking cautiously optimistic.

"That went…much better than expected," she said, her hands brushing Marceline's aside and flying over the straps to let her out of the harness. It tipped forward a little bit, like a real jaeger harness would, and Bonnibel didn't step back in time; Marceline stumbled against her and it was only partly on purpose. They were very close all of a sudden and Bonnie's blue eyes were very wide, but she stepped back quickly. Not, however, before Marceline had a chance to catch the tinge of a sweet, fresh scent, something like strawberries.

"Yes…um," Bubblegum said. "Anyway. I think you could potentially handle an AI combat simulation tomorrow. Nothing too difficult or strenuous. What…what do you think, Captain Abadeer?"

So we were back to that. It had been _Marceline _in the drift, but jeez, get a little bit up in her personal space and it was rank and file all the way. Whatever. "Sure, princess. What're we gonna do tonight, though?" She only leered a little bit.

"_What? _You mean this evening? Oh. I was thinking we could try some combat training, armed or unarmed, just to see where you stand in that area and to get you ready for the candidacy trials."

Well, this was interesting. "Who'm I gonna be training with?"

Bonnibel blushed a little bit, frowning. "Well, me. I trust there are no objections."

_Definitely _interesting.

"Not from me," Marceline said, holding up her hands and grinning. "Should be fun."

Bonnibel nodded shortly. "I'll see you shortly after dinner, Captain. And –"

"I know, I know. Don't be late."

There was some time before dinner so Marceline threaded her way back through the labyrinth of corridors to her bunk. She hadn't pegged Bonnibel Bubblegum Bennett as the type to have trained in combat, but it wouldn't have been the first time she'd underestimated somebody and been knocked on her ass by a mechanic or a builder. Kaiju tended to bring that impulse out in people: you wanted to get yourself as prepared as possible. Of course there was no way to prepare to go hand-to-hand solo with a kaiju, but being able to subdue a person who was panicking or inciting a riot could definitely come in handy, so a lot more people had learned marshal arts skills of various types than in the pre-kaiju world.

But was Miss Bennett prepared to go head to head with a trained jaeger pilot? That remained to be seen. Marceline had no illusions that the strength that served you well in construction work was the same as the strength that helped you in combat, but she'd been training long enough to have developed muscle memory. It was bound to come back. Definitely _interesting_, was the only conclusion she could come to. And there was _definitely _time for a nap before dinner.


	7. Chapter 7

**Ride the Drift**

**Viridicus**

**A/N: **OMG. Y'all are gonna really like this one, I swear. This is when things start really picking up. Thanks so much for all the kind reviews; my life has kind of been crazy right now but I have a bunch of chapters waiting for you, so keep 'em coming!

**Chapter Seven**

In anticipation of her sparring date with Bonnibel, Marceline deliberately ate light, eschewing her usual heaping plate of pasta (generally the only thing that was halfway palatable in the Shatterdome's mess hall) for an only partially wilted salad. She wasn't sure what made her think there was more muscle under Bonnibel's generally loose-fitting clothing than she'd initially expected, and she also wasn't sure why she was imagining said musculature – _all right, be honest with yourself, Abadeer_, she thought witheringly. _The girl's fine. It's just her personality that's the problem. _

The thought had come, like many of them did, in Marshall Lee's voice. _Shut up, _she snapped back at him, just like she would have if he had still been alive and here with her. If he had been, though, he wouldn't have shut up, he would have kept teasing her until it had been time to go down to the lab. The silence in her head echoed.

Head full of thunderclouds, Marceline stowed her tray and threaded her way through the hallways to Bonnibel's lab. To her surprise, the girl wasn't there. A moment later she realized why: there was absolutely no space to spar in the lab. _Nice going, Abadeer. Okay, so there's probably a gym around here somewhere. The question is where? _She spun around, but she'd only been to about three places in the Shatterdome and the gym wasn't one of them. _Fabulous. That's strike one against me. _She was never going to hear the end of it from Bonnibel.

Luck was with her, though. "Hey, Marceline!" Finn hailed her as he rounded the corner. "You look lost. Weren't you supposed to be sparring with Bonnie today?"

"I was…and I have no idea where," she said. "Any chance you could show me?"

"Sure!" he said, beaming.

"Plus it'll give you a little extra time with your lady friend," she said slyly, nudging him in the ribs. As expected, he turned bright red.

"Oh, she's not…I mean...we're not…" He lapsed into silence, the power of speech apparently gone.

"It's okay, dude," she said as they walked. "You told her you're interested?"

"I mean…kinda? I'm not sure. Every time I try I kind of…well, my brain kind of wanders off and I just end up babbling, you know? Jake says I need to romance her, but…I don't know how, really."

"Well, Jake's wrong," Marceline said. "A girl like Bonnibel's got her head up in the clouds, you know? She's got a lot of stuff on her mind. If you try to be all subtle and junk she just won't get it. You gotta just come right out with it and tell her."

Finn wrinkled his nose, making himself look impossibly young. Marceline felt for him. "Tell her what?"

"'Hey, Bonnie, I like you, I hope you like me, maybe we should go get noodles sometime when all this is over.' Jazz like that."

Finn appeared pensive. "Noodles…huh. I haven't tried that before." He turned to her, his smile brilliant. "Hey, thanks Marceline!"

She couldn't help but smile back. Something about this kid just made bad moods vanish like clouds before a breeze. "No problem, kiddo."

They had reached the gym. She thanked him and walked inside to see Bonnibel, dressed in a stomach-lurchingly tight workout outfit, bending her body into some kind of impossible stretch. "Is that your best pretzel impression or are you just happy to see me?"

"Gotta be the pretzel part," Bubblegum huffed, detangling herself and glancing pointedly at the clock. "_Late._"

"No, actually, my name's Marceline." She held out her hand, undaunted before the princess's withering look. The girl took it and stood.

"I figured we'd start with some stretching and then do some simple staff combat. Nothing strenuous, just seeing where you are with things. I know it's been a while – "

"If you want to call me old, just do it," Marceline said, shrugging out of the sweats she'd put on for the cold damp of the hallways.

_"_Oh please. You know what I meant. You're out of practice, out of fighting shape, and –"

"Old," Marceline said, grabbing a staff from off a rack in the corner, cracking her knuckles, and settling into a fighting stance. "And wily. You ready for this?"

Bonnibel stared at her. "You're not even gonna stretch?"

"Nope. You called me old. We have a score to settle."

"What? That's not what I –" she squawked, then stopped herself. "No, no, I am not going to let you get a rise out of me, because that's precisely what you want," she said, drawing herself up dignifiedly. "Are you sure you don't want to stretch? You'll be sorry tomorrow."

Marceline grinned, flicking her tongue across one canine. "You saying you're gonna wear me out?"

Bonnibel rolled her eyes, but the reddening of her skin belied her nonchalance. "No strikes to the face, stomach, or vital organs. The goal is to pin or incapacitate. Four times wins."

"Ready when you are, Bubblegum."

Bonnibel narrowed her eyes. It was so on.

Marceline had never won any fights by hesitating, but she didn't really want to hit Bonnie until she knew what she was made of. She started circling and the princess mirrored her movements perfectly, step for step. She was waiting for Bonnibel to make the first move but the girl was only eyeing her calmly, staff held at the ready, looking like she could do this forever. Marceline lost patience first, breaking their pattern with a wild lunge that Bonnibel didn't even bother to block. She sidestepped it easily and tapped her staff to the back of Marceline's neck. "First point," she said. "You sure you don't want to stretch?"

Marceline growled in answer and launched into a flurrying series of attacks, which Bubblegum parried. The staff felt odd in her hands and her muscles felt stiff, but she could feel them remembering the forms as she stepped through them, and knew she could do this. She could beat Bonnie. And she did, spying an opportunity where she let her guard open just a smidge. She drove her staff into that opening and brought it up under Bonnibel's knees, sweeping her. Kneeling swiftly, she tapped the tip of the girl's nose gently, smiling. "First." Bonnibel glared.

Without warning she hooked her own leg behind Marceline's and they were rolling, battling to gain the advantage, Marceline only just managing to keep hold of her staff as they went. She had been right: the girl _was_ stronger than she first appeared, but she didn't have Marceline's crude power, product of her work in construction. Eventually she managed to plant one foot, stop the roll, and press her staff over Bonnibel's throat. "That's two," she said breathlessly. "Don't get cocky."

Bubblegum let out a snarling noise Marceline hadn't expected she could make and bucked under her, throwing her across the mat. She only just managed to curl her body into a roll and make it to her feet in time to block the princess's next strike. The attacks came swiftly and relentlessly after that, Marceline's breath being drawn out of her in short sharp pants at the girl's speed. The pace of their fight was almost enough that she couldn't notice just how much she was enjoying the flush that appeared in Bonnibel's cheeks, and how well she moved, and how good other things looked in the tight yoga pants and tank top. She definitely noticed when Bonnibel's staff smacked her firmly in the small of her back, making her yelp. "That's two for me," she said. "Focus, Captain."

And focus she did. Their battle took them all over the room, parrying, blocking, trading who was on the attack and who was defending, their bodies moving together in what was starting to feel less like a fight and more like a dance. It became less about trying to get one up on Bonnie and more about making it so her staff met the princess's, and using her momentum in her own movements. It wouldn't have looked out of place in a ballroom, she thought, a feeling she couldn't place that was somehow familiar swelling in her chest. She didn't try too hard to place it, though. She was _enjoying _this, enjoying a fight for the first time in years. It was a lot like with Marshall, how they fought, how they'd always fought, even as kids, with the enjoyment of combat and the long familiarity with one another's physical presences. There was something of a different feel to it with Bonnie because _she_ was different, new and undiscovered, but Marceline was learning her and in time she thought she could know a lot more. It was a lot like…

"Shit, Bonnie," she said, stopping just short of a sharp whack to the nose. "Don't you see what this means? We're –"

"Third!" Bonnibel crowed as her staff rapped across the bridge of Marceline's nose, for real this time. Marceline howled.

"Goddammit!" Except it came out sounding more like "globdammit" due to the blood pouring down her lips. The pain was excruciating, making her drop to her knees, her eyes watering. "Jesus god!"

"Let me see." The voice was calm but firm, a doctor at an emergency scene, and warm hands were grasping hers and pulling them gently but strongly away from her nose. Very, very carefully Bonnibel's fingers probed at her face, making her wince. But it wasn't too bad. She curtailed the impulse to play the injury up.

"It's not broken," she said, relief plain in her voice. "A nasty bump, but that'll fade."

"You sound almost concerned," Marceline said dryly, meeting blue eyes that were suddenly very close. Her breath caught in her chest. Bonnibel pulled away abruptly.

"I mean, if I managed to break your nose on your second day of training the Marshall would kill me," Bonnibel said briskly. "Hold on a second." She moved off – Marceline nearly whined at the loss of the warmth of those hands – and came back with a towel, which she proffered to Marceline. "Now do you think we can continue, or do I need to take you to the nursery?"

Marceline frowned, making her nose burn. "What?"

"You know, where they keep the babies."

"Oh, it's _so _on, princess," she growled, surging to her feet and grabbing up her staff. Just as she brought it back into guard, Bubblegum struck. She barely managed to get her staff in the way in time, but had the presence of mind to twist with the movement and land another point across Bonnibel's back. "Third!" Then the girl was whirling away again, her movements inviting Marceline to follow, and she did.

They danced back and forth over the fourth point, both of them far too stubborn to give an inch. But gradually the realization that Marceline had had before the sudden sharp pain had whacked it out of her mind returned, along with one other: this was _fun. And when was the last time you had fun, Abadeer? _she wondered. _Fun that didn't involve getting wasted, that is. _She had to think back a long time to answer that question.

Marceline felt that she could have done this all night, but all too soon it was over. She missed a step, Bonnibel saw her opportunity, and her staff swept right under Marceline's ankle, dropping her to the mat. She tried to roll and failed – her muscles had decided that she was actually fine where she was, thanks – and soon Bonnibel was hovering over her, staff at her jugular to deliver the coup de grace. She was flushed, smiling, strands of pink hair wisping out of her previously severe bun, as she said, "Point!"

Marceline found herself captivated by a bead of sweat traveling down Bonnie's jawline and down her throat, and further. It took Bubblegum snapping her fingers several times in Marceline's face to restore her concentration. "Hey, did you hear what I said? That was the fourth point!"

With a sudden surge of strength Marceline abandoned her staff to roll them and pin Bonnibel, who squealed in protest. "_Hey!_"

"Wily, remember?" she panted, grinning, as she caught first one of Bubblegum's wrists – her hand was currently seeking a way to break the hold – and then the other.

Then there was nothing Bonnie could do but glare up at her murderously and snap, "And a cheat, too, I see. The fight was over."

"It's never over," Marceline said. "Not even when your jaeger is being pulled apart piece by piece. Not even when your copilot gets killed. It's not over until you're dead." She hadn't anticipated the suddenly somber turn things were taking, but she felt it was important that Bonnibel understand. "Got that, princess?"

Slowly, the girl nodded. She was staring very intently up at Marceline, who found herself entranced by those blue eyes, drawn in by them, wanting to see them closer up, to fathom their depths… But something was pressing on her mind, something that had been driven out of it by a sharp whack to the nose, and all of sudden she remembered. "Bonnie. Didn't you feel it?"

The princess let out a sudden breath. "Feel what?"

"The way we were fighting, the way we were moving, like, _together_, not against each other! That's – c'mon, you _have_ to have felt it too!"

"All I feel is that you're really heavy and you're sitting on me," Bonnibel grumped. Marceline stood immediately and offered her a hand, which the princess disdained, climbing to her feet herself. "Okay, _what? _Why are you _grinning_ like that, anyway?"

"Bonnie, we're drift compatible."

The girl wrinkled her nose. "What? What do you mean? Just because we had a good fight – which I won, by the way – why does that make us drift compatible?"

Marceline grinned harder, and then all of a sudden grabbed one of Bonnibel's hands, forcing their fingers to interlock, put the other on her shoulder, and put her own on the girl's waist, moving her in an exaggerated waltz and enjoying her attempts to break free. "It's like, we weren't fighting, we were _dancing_. It's about how we move with each other, how we react to one another, how we can feel what the other one is going to do before they do it. It's what makes people good dance partners, good teammates, good lovers. Usually you only find it with family or somebody you've been boinking for a while – somebody you've known for a long time, not somebody you've just met. It's how you _sync._"

Bonnibel had turned bright red at the mention of _boinking_ and finally succeeded in her struggle to extricate herself from Marceline's grasp. "And so what if we are? My job is to get you ready to pilot your jaeger, not to…to pilot it with you." Her voice broke just ever so slightly when she said that, and Marceline had a flash of insight.

"But that's not what you want, is it."

"I have no idea what you mean by that –"

"You want to be in there with me," she said, slowly advancing. "You want to be in there just as much as I do."

"That's not what my job is," Bonnibel said, staring at her, refusing to give ground but looking like she wanted to break and run.

"Doesn't matter. You want it anyway. Listen, Bonnie, I drifted with Marshall for six years and we connected well because we were twins, because we knew everything about each other and we'd been pretty much inseparable our entire lives. But I've _never _felt that kind of connection with anyone. Not even him," she said, although it was painful as hell to admit it. "Twenty-three years of being my brother and we never had a fight like that."

She brought herself up short, suddenly realizing how close they were. She could hear Bonnibel's breathing, shallow and sharp, could almost feel it against her skin. The girl was a good bit shorter than her, like her head would have tucked comfortably under Marceline's chin, should it have had any reason to be there. Marceline put that thought firmly out of her mind, and took Bonnie's shoulders in her hands very gently. "I want you in there with me," she said, low but firm. She could practically feel Bonnie wanting it too. But –

"I can't," she said, twisting out of Marceline's grip and bolting for the door. She threw a panicked look back over her shoulder as she left, leaving Marceline with empty hands and a head full of questions.


End file.
